Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

Not all of my work as a consultant is about driving better use of best practice software development techniques. Much like Neelix, I also take it upon myself to improve the moral of the people I work with, even though that is neither required, nor wanted, by the companies I am working with.

Thus when the Sky Leeds Bake Off was announced I jumped in straight away.

Sky’s slogan is “believe in better” so I was originally going to write “believe in butter” on the cake. However, I soon realised there was not enough space, so opted for some simple branding instead. In turns out I was the only person to suck up like a spineless worm in this way.

Competition was tough. Mine scores well for taste but ended up only ranking in the middle of the field with a score of 15/20. The runaway winner was Dave, by a clear 1.5 points. His dedication really has to be admired. He demonstrated he had the skill, the dedication, and the balls, to drag his 8-month pregnant wife out of bed at 4am to make the cake for him. You just can’t compete with that tenacity.

After the results we were encouraged to throw some money into the put and have a slice of cake. Most people threw some loose change in, so doing the maths I put a note in and covered a dinner plate in cake. I have no idea which ones were the best because it was all mixed in to one mountain of cake. I felt so sick. Totally worth it.

After our final tournament day of the season, we (Leeds Samurai) stopped off in Skipton to visit the pirate-themed restaurant Calico Jack.

It was okay. I go the steak and ribs combo. The steak was over-cooked. I asked for it medium and you might be able to argue that it was medium-well if you were being generous, but I would not have argued if you had called it well done. The ribs were reasonably tender, but not a patch on Cattle Grid of TGI. Similarly I thought the coleslaw and potato wedges were just very average.

It’s a cool place to go, and everyone seemed to be happy with their meal. I feel there is definitely room for improvement food-wise though.

Wild Food is a book by Roger Phillips and is on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recommended reading list from his Rover Cottage Q&A.

The sub-heading on the cover is:

A complete guide for foragers

However, it isn’t. In the introduction it talks about how it is not a field guide to identification, and really doesn’t help you actually forage any food. It does however give you a great range of recipes and cooking options once you have gathered the ingredients.

It splits the contents into mushrooms, flowers, seaweed, vegetables and herbs, fruits and berries, and finally teas, beers and wines. It then goes through each of the ingredients and tells you what to do with them.

The book itself is really nice: a matt hardback cover with plenty of colour photos inside. I haven’t really used it though because every time I buy such a book, it seems to insist it is not a field guide, and you need to get another book for that.

It does pick up massive points though, because in my review of The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency I said I was always going to be disappointed in the future whenever a book did not have a section on brewing and wine making – this one did not disappoint!

John Seymour gives loads of examples of how to make fun bread in The New Complete Book of Self Sufficiency. However, unlike Paul Hollywood’s nice step by step instructions, John is more of a “why not try adding honey” method, and then just lets you get on with.

Results vary.

The barley bread turned out okay. This was just a standard bloomer recipe with half of the white flour substituted for bread flour. It came out well though I’m not a huge fan of the taste.

This was a mess. According to John’s recipe, you make it with boiling water. This makes it difficult to mix and never formed one cohesive ball. It is also made with baking powder rather than yeast. This made for a flat, flavourless bread.

Another recipe where I swapped out half of the flour, this time for buckwheat. I also added one and a half eggs to see what happened. What happened was that the dough collapsed while proving. I probably added too much liquid.

Surprisingly tasty though. Quite a nutty flavour.

From Paul Hollywood’s Bread. This is a really nice flatbread recipe because the breads come out incredibly 3D. I like this. Regular flatbreads are nice but as you know, they only exist in two dimensions. These things are fat.

Of course I could just bake a bloomer. However, these are designed to be big and round. It is the surprisingly bonus of a light airy well-risen bread that makes these so tasty.

I did not have most of the ingredients he recommended for the topping so I combined thyme and caraway with olive oil. They did not stick well at all; they just fall off as soon as you pick the bread up sideways. However, they are tasty.

Food For Free is a book by Richard Mabey on foraging. I got the pocket-sized edition which is great for travelling around with.

It contains descriptions of loads of different plants you will find it Britain and each one comes with an illustration and a photo. It describes what it looks like and what you can do with it. All good stuff.

On the negative side, it is very insistent that you use a real identification guide, which it claims this is not. I felt that distracted a lot from the purpose of the book. Why make it pocket-sized for example if you’re not taking it into the field?

It is also arranged alphabetically whereas I felt grouping similar plants together would be more useful. If I see a plant I want to be able to find that section and work out which one it is. That way also has difficulties – how do you find the section you want if you already know what it is, and how do you judge what is similar? However, on balance I think the trade off would have been worth it.

It does however address any concerns you might have that you could accidentally pick something poisonous by telling you it will probably be fine. I feel much better after that…

Hugh’s Veg Every Day! book is probably my favourite cookbook so far, so I was eager to see what River Cottage Every Day has to offer.

It’s not as good, but still useful. Mostly I think it is just a bit more hit and miss. The rabbit stew for example was rubbish. Whereas the home-cured bacon chops were pretty good and the breaded fish fillets were a winner.

The biggest challenge can often be getting the ingredients for the recipes. I haven’t dared schedule in devilled lamb hearts and oxtail stew yet in case my butcher can’t supply the foods, and the Thai seafood soup required squeezing a trip to the fish market into my lunch break.

The best part is probably the bread though. Hugh’s focaccia recipe has quickly found a regular place in our kitchen.

We have a One Pot cookbook already and it’s reasonably good. At least in theory, when I use it it has been good, though I rarely do. This book is a much larger (size wise it is A4, though not long) and similarly well presented with large photos and simple instructions with clear timings.

All of that is brilliant.

It is let down by the rest of it though. Many of the recipes just do not work very well and often they take longer than 30 minutes. They also differ from the one pot philosophy (dump everything into a pot and cook) with a variety of different cooking styles, though I’m not too fussed about this.

There are some nice recipes that I am sure we will be doing again. The meatballs worked quite well. However it look quite a quite to narrow it down to the ones that work and the ones that do not, which was a frustrating process.

Don’t get your hopes up, it isn’t 500 ways to cook a vegetarian. However, it is still pretty good. For a start, it has 500 recipes in. That is loads. Often such lists would just be identical dishes (beans with fennel, beans with onion, beans with leek), but the book does a pretty good job of providing genuinely different recipes.

Everything has a photo too. They are only small, but that is better than fewer, larger photos in my opinion. The recipes are reasonably simple and don’t take too long to make, though are not massively fancy or memorable. It’s a good every day book though.

Simon Rimmer claims he bought a vegetarian cafe and then learned how to cook. Given how successful Greens has been, you have to wonder how true that is. However, with it being a cookbook, who really cares.

The book is okay. It has some good recipes in it, most notably the sweet potato and pineapple sandwich (a main that uses pineapple for bread), Lancashire cheese sausages (that contain so much cheese they are probably less healthy than real sausages) and honeycomb ice cream.

Overall though it is let down by not having a photo of most of the recipes. The photos that do exist are large and colourful, but I dislike recipe books in which I cannot judge if what I have made looks anything like it should or not.